


The Body Politic

by Aramley



Series: from nothing comes a king [2]
Category: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25579009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: When the barons revolt, Arthur takes it better than anyone had expected.
Relationships: Arthur/Goosefat Bill
Series: from nothing comes a king [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1853839
Comments: 8
Kudos: 72
Collections: King Arthur LoS Fave fics





	The Body Politic

**Author's Note:**

> Broadly a sequel to [Release](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16583861), though you don't have to read that one first.

When the barons revolt, Arthur takes it better than anyone had expected.

"Honestly," he says. "You lot must think I'm slow. Anyone who didn't see this coming a mile off, raise your hand."

He leans back in his chair and looks around the round table at the assembled knights. Only Tristan raises his hand. Arthur points at him. 

"That man is the last optimist in Britain," he says. "Wetstick, we should have you stuffed."

"They're old blood," Tristan says, defensively. "I thought that lot took this Born King stuff seriously. No offense."

"They do," Bill interjects. He's been acting as a go-between for Arthur and the barons since the coronation and he knows their mood, though they've done their best to conceal it from him. "Under the usual circumstances."

"What's unusual about these circumstances?" says Tristan. 

"What Goosefat means," says Arthur, "is that on reflection the barons don't much like having a brothel boy on the throne, especially one they didn't put there. So they've had a little think amongst themselves and decided that getting handed a sword by a magic lady in a pond wasn't what made Uther a king, and if all I've got on my side is blood, well, they've all got a royal bastard stashed in the family cellars."

"Literally, in at least one case I know of," Bill can't help but interject.

"So they've picked someone whose royal blood has trickled the shortest way downhill, rummaged around and found that they do, in fact, have a bollock between them, and decided to put it to use. Is that about the size of it, Bill?"

"Astutely observed as always, my king," says Bill.

Arthur blows him a kiss. Bill makes a mental note to take that out of him later, though Arthur is so generally full of obnoxious gestures and teasing mock-flirtations that it passes unremarked. Bill's no green hand at deceit, but still, it's an untimely reminder that this nonsense with Arthur is ill-advised at best, that he should have nipped it in the bud - that he should, ultimately, never have started it. 

"Can they be reasoned with?" Percival asks. "They can't think that a civil war is in their best interests."

Bill shrugs. "Ordinarily I'd advocate a diplomatic approach, but I think we're well beyond that now." 

"Sometimes the only thing that gets through is a good slap," says Arthur.

"We are talking about nobility, not back-alley gangsters," says Bedivere - though Bill, as a one-time fellow-member of that august class, inclines to disagree.

Arthur shakes his head. "The only difference is the scale. Vortigern was so obsessed with his Tower he let the earls run their lands like petty kingdoms, and now here I am stepping on their turf. They want me to earn it."

George says, "We can do it. My boys have whipped up an army out of the old guard that won't put its tail between its legs at the first sniff of a fight."

"Plus, you know." Tristan makes a swooshy gesture. Confronted with a semicircle of blank stares he elaborates: "Magic sword?"

"Civil war is not a joke," says Bedivere. He meets Bill's eyes and the understanding passes between them: after the long dark years of resistance, after finally tasting victory, this isn't exactly what they'd hoped for.

"I'm sorry," Arthur says, which is enough in the way of a novelty to make Bill glance over. Arthur doesn't look sorry, only angry - a contained, smouldering kind of anger. "This isn't what I wanted, but I'll be fucked if I let a bunch of blue-bloods run me off just because they don't like the looks of me. They want a war? Let's have one."

-

"They just don't like him," Bill says, later, when he and Bedivere are alone in Bedivere's chambers and comfortably out of the king's earshot. "That's the unvarnished truth of it. One can hardly blame them - personally, I consider regicide on an almost daily basis."

"Bill," Bedivere warns, turning on Bill the quelling look he usually keeps in store for the king - a fact which rather undermines the admonishment, to Bill's mind.

"What's more," Bill continues, "he had the audacity to take the throne without their help, so they have no leverage."

Bedivere sighs, and hands Bill a cup of good wine. "We should have pushed him harder to approach the barons, before."

"He'd be no better off indebted to them."

"Still. I had hoped we could avoid this sort of," Bedivere makes an expansive, tired gesture: "situation."

"Hm," Bill allows. He sips the wine, which is good and warming against an unseasonable chill. Soon it will be autumn proper, harvest time - out of the season for war. Barring a rapid escalation of events likely the first blows won't be struck until spring, which leaves the country in limbo and running through the stores of goodwill laid down by the accession of the Born King.

"Perhaps we were naive," says Bedivere. "We forgot that it's easier to take a throne than to hold it."

"I don't think either of us could be accused of naïveté," says Bill. "We were struck down with a far more grievous affliction, my friend."

"What's that?"

"Hope."

Bedivere rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and groans. "I hate it when you get philosophical."

When Bill returns to his own rooms he finds Arthur already there and waiting: lounging on the bed, goblet in hand, like he owns the place.

"I hope you were discreet," Bill says, bolting the door behind him. "And I also hope that's not my wine you're drinking."

"Your wine is my wine; that's how being the king works," Arthur says. "Where've you been?"

"With Bedivere," says Bill. He shrugs out of his cloak and tosses it over a waiting chair. "And my wine is my wine; that's how private property works."

"No wonder my ears were burning," Arthur grumbles, ignoring the latter comment. He shuffles forward until he's sitting on the edge of the bed. "Has he got that face on? The one like -" Arthur makes a face of disappointment and mild consternation which is, somehow, uncannily like Bedivere. To hide his amusement Bill goes over and tries to take the cup from Arthur, who shifts obligingly enough to let Bill stand between his knees, but holds the cup out of reach.

"Nice try," Arthur says. "Crown property, this."

"Personally, I'm amazed it's taken someone this long to rebel," Bill says. He makes another swipe at the cup and this time Arthur relinquishes it, likely only because, as Bill finds, it's empty. Typical. "Did anyone see you come here?"

"Don't stress yourself, sweetheart," Arthur says. "I've been waiting in here so long that if anyone saw me they'll have forgotten by now."

"So demanding," Bill says. He touches the corner of Arthur's mouth, lightly. "Perhaps you should keep me on a leash."

"There's an idea," Arthur says, and drags him down.

-

Arthur sometimes mocks him for his paranoia, but really what the rest of the Round Table know or what they suspect Bill couldn't say; if they know, they don't remark on it and if they suspect, they keep their suspicions close. Maybe he sees it sometimes in their eyes, but then he is by nature suspicious; maybe he hears it in the careful way Bedivere says, "He should have a wife."

Bill looks up from his papers, on which he is trying to account for the cost of the coming war. 

"Bedivere," he says. "If you want to tell the king he's to be studded out to some baronial broodmare as soon as he's finished kicking her father's arse then be my guest, but I suggest you go and get kitted out with a full suit of armour first."

Maybe it's simply over-caution. Likely Bedivere has a ledger somewhere with each female issue of acceptable bloodline with broad hips and unwebbed fingers carefully noted, but Bill's ledgers are full of harvest yield, taxes, and crown assets. Vortigern wrung the kingdom hard in his reign but it all went into that Tower, now a useless heap of rubble being cleared away by a small worker village paid and fed by the crown - and by Bill's reckoning the crown does rather more paying and feeding than it can comfortably afford. 

"It would be for the good of the kingdom," Bedivere says, in a tone which suggests he is more concerned with convincing himself than convincing Bill, or for that matter, Arthur. Bill gives him the look it deserves and Bedivere lets the subject drop.

Bill has no fine feelings to be wounded by Arthur's marriage, and when he has the luxury of concerning himself with it he'll hash it out all day long. Until then if this is Bedivere's way of letting on that he knows it's a strange one. He can hardly think that Bill's angling for a coronet and really, all things considered, he ought to be grateful: at least Arthur's less likely to get an inconvenient bastard this way than if he went around tipping over serving-girls. 

Not that Arthur seems to look much at serving girls, or scullery girls, or laundry girls, or any other sort of girls employed in Camelot's vast estates. Arthur is universally kind to the high-born women of the fledgling court, and devoted to the women he brought with him from Londinium, and towards the mage - who flits in and out of life at Camelot at will - he's teasing and brotherly (though if Bill were to lay money anywhere against Bedivere's plans for a politically convenient marriage, it would be here - there's a softness to the way Arthur looks at her sometimes, a tenderness to his teasing). Arthur's good with women, but he doesn't fuck them. That's an honour reserved, as far as Bill is aware, for himself.

-

The first time it happens it's not so much an indulgence as a necessity. Those first few months Arthur stalks around Camelot with a caged look, as if perpetually on the verge of hitting something or someone. Bill just decides he'll be the one to throw the first punch. They throw each other around a bit, Arthur pins him, it's all grand, except that certain forms of physical relief have a tendency to become other forms, particularly if you're on the end of a very, very long dry spell. For a week afterwards Arthur's like a clear sky after a summer storm. It isn't as though Bill's ungrateful for the experience either, but he supposes that's an end to it - so it's a surprise when Arthur comes to his rooms one night, reminding Bill of promises made in the heat of the moment that he finds himself only too willing to fulfil.

For a man who built himself on the hard streets of Londinium and carries himself with a heavy mantle of pride, Arthur's surprisingly easy about having Bill lay him out on the bed, pin him in place, have things his own way. Maybe he finds it restful.

"That's nice," Arthur pants, when Bill's inside him. He laughs up at Bill, thighs tight against his sides, urging him on. "Come on, come on."

"Easy," Bill says, already closer to his own edge than he's ever going to admit.

"Who're you calling easy," Arthur grins, which is all the provocation Bill needs.

Afterwards, Bill's not sure what he expects - a quick roll away, cheers for that, see you in council tomorrow? - but Arthur turns out to be a lingerer. More accurately, he sprawls.

"I could get used to that," Arthur says, and bites Bill's shoulder hard enough to bruise.

In the long years he's spent on the run, Bill's chances to match inclination to opportunity have been few and far between. He could get used to it, too.

-

Tensions escalate, and reports begin to trickle in from Bill's networks: the barons are massing troops on Northumberland's estates, arraying themselves around the cannily-chosen figurehead of some young pretender who's handy with a sword and looks a bit like a Pendragon by-blow if you squint. Who knows where they dredged him up. Truth and rumour mingle strangely: someone, in a stroke of inconvenient genius puts about that he is called the Young Dragon, and attributes to him strange powers. By such rumours movements start, as Bill knows better than most. Camelot is alive with preparations. 

"Is he like his dad?" Tristan asks, as he and Bill stand on a section of the battlements and watch Arthur watch George put a couple of battalions through some complicated manoeuvre of his own devising. The rain comes down in a thin, continuous drizzle, and Bill adjusts his cloak more tightly, thinking how strange it is that only he and Bedivere remember Uther, and how strange it still is to be back at a Camelot where Uther is not.

"In some ways," he says. 

"Does he look like him?"

"No." Tristan looks dissatisfied, so Bill elaborates. "He has his mother's colouring. Uther was very dark, but Ygraine was fair. He's Uther's build, though maybe broader. Shorter, too, but don't tell him that."

Tristan laughs. "When we were kids he'd get in a fight a week over someone calling him small. Me and this gang of boys used to tease him - Arfer, is it, like 'alf a kid? - and he'd go spare. But he kicked my arse around the alley one day and I never called him small again."

"Must have been some beating," says Bill.

"It was, but that weren't why I ended up following him," says Tristan, grinning. "It was cause he picked me up after and let me come round to the girls to clean up before I went home to my mum, cause he knew she'd go mental if I slunk home looking like I did. That was Arthur, never any bad blood. He was a sod to his enemies and a lion for his mates."

"He's like his father in that way, then," says Bill.

"Yeah?" 

"Yes."

Arthur's voice drifts up towards them from the practice ground below - the cadence of it, not the substance, though he's pointing at a place where a flank of soldiers pivots awkwardly away from the centre column, making a weakness. Where did you learn that, coming where you came from? Bill thinks, not for the first time in Arthur's reign.

"Arthur's dad," Tristan says in a half-wondering tone of voice, like the existence of such a person is beyond the power of his imagination. Then Tristan nods towards Arthur. "Do you remember him, too, from back then?"

Bill manages not to grimace, just. Arthur's asked him this, too, while sprawled out over Bill's bed and body in a satiated yet wicked mood, grinning heartily at the look of discomfort that Bill can never quite manage to hide. 

"You do," he'd said, and rumbled a low, filthy laugh all along the length of Bill's body. "You dirty old man. What would my father say?"

It’s not what Uther would have said but what he would have done that Bill could most vividly imagine, but in any case it's impossible to connect the Arthur of Bill’s memories - that quiet blond boy, pet of the court ladies and joy of his father's heart - with the Arthur of the present. He's their son, but he's not the prince that Uther and Ygraine would have raised and he's not the man or the king that prince would have become. Increasingly, and to Bill's own surprise, he finds he means this as a neutral observation. 

-

England and Camelot have been bruised and battered by the years of Vortigern's rule, but then so has Bill - years of creeping in Albion's dark corners, of huts and caves and cellars and cells taking their toll. 

The first time Arthur sees his scars Bill brushes his hands away, and Arthur avoids them for a long time - careful without being obviously careful. It's only one winter's night after their arrangement has been going on for a long while, that Bill allows Arthur to lay him out and map him to his satisfaction: every touch a question that on this particular evening Bill feels disposed to answer. He lies on his belly in the tangle they've made of the king's bed, head pillowed on his arms, while Arthur smoothes big broad hands over Bill's skin.

"These -" As Arthur's fingers trace overlapping sets of long, silvered scars running the length of Bill's back from shoulder blades to waist, "- I got from Mercia. Those are from Mercia too. Those - " sharper, younger lines hatched perpendicular to the rest - "were the work of my lord of Clarendon when I was his guest, though I didn't think much of his hospitality. Yes, Mercia again - by his own hand, no less. His technique was very bad - I was a connoisseur of floggings by that time. That one -" as Arthur grazes blunt fingernails over a deeper, ragged-edged scar curving downwards over his hip, "- I got from a broken bar crawling out of a cell window."

Arthur makes a rough, amused sound, and kisses the small of Bill's back. "Had you ever thought about trying not to get caught so often?"

Bill turns to catch Arthur's eye over his shoulder. "And miss out on my hard-earned nickname?"

"Mm," Arthur says. He reaches for a spot on Bill's forearm. "What about this one?"

"That's a good one - I got _that_ when some mouthy little pimp shopped me to the Blacklegs in Londinium. Oi, no biting!"

When Arthur's hand traces a hopeful line southwards Bill considers letting Arthur fuck him that night, though in the end he doesn't. Any experienced interrogee knows that the game is to cede little by little, and Arthur goes easy enough with a push in the right direction.

-

When they march out to war at last no-one really expects it to be a fight, least of all the barons. The point isn't to win - they've no clearer idea of what they'd do with the throne if they won it than Arthur had when it fell to him - but to disrupt, to throw their weight around a little, to prove to Uther's son that the old guard can still cause problems if they want. It would probably help this cause if they didn't shit themselves at the first sign of Excalibur. 

Bill, in the king's guard, watches as the lines falter and break - the peasant army under the pretender's flag dropping its makeshift weapons in the mud churned up around them by the retreating baronial forces.

When the barons surrender it becomes apparent that the Young Dragon is to be their scapegoat now that his usefulness as a figurehead has run out. Northumberland himself brings the boy to the royal pavilion, hands bound, as a symbol of goodwill. He has a lump the size of a hen’s egg at the back of his skull that nobody on the Camelot side gave him and plainly expects to die, an expectation which he carries with dignity. Close up it turns out that he does look a bit like a Pendragon, if you squint.

Arthur regards him evenly. “What’s your name?”

“Gawain,” the boy says.

“And how’ve you got mixed up in this mess, Gawain?”

“The Saxons burned my village,” Gawain says, his voice low and furious. “They burned villages all along the coast. We sent to Camelot for aid but no-one came, so I put together a war-band and we drove them back to the sea. Then he -“ Gawain indicates old Northumberland, who visibly flinches “- sent for me, and said if I joined with them they’d see to it that the villages were guarded.”

“That’s an honourable reason," Arthur says. With a sideways glance, he adds, "I hope for your sake they were going to keep their promise.”

“I never wanted to be king,” Gawain says, defiant. “I don’t give a shit who sits on the throne, as long as they keep the people safe.”

“That’s what I want,” Arthur says. “But none of us are going to get that done by running around the country playing silly bastards, trying to take lumps out of each other, are we?”

Then Arthur raises Excalibur. The barons tense, Gawain’s shoulders set and his jaw rises. Then the blade flashes downwards like quicksilver, and the bindings at Gawain's wrists fall away.

“I like you,” Arthur says to Gawain, as the boy gapes at him and Bill releases a breath he hadn't known he was holding. “I think you’d like me if you got to know me. I’m a likeable bloke. Ask these guys. Except for Bedivere, don’t ask him.”

-

At midsummer, Camelot celebrates . Gawain kneels to accept his knighthood, the barons kneel to pledge their fealty, and some time later amid the noise and bustle of the evening banquet Arthur drags Bill into what must be the single unoccupied corridor left in all of Camelot and does a spot of kneeling of his own.

The days that follow are golden, a kind of unofficial high holiday. Half the people of England seem to have come to Camelot for the festivities and are reluctant to trickle back to their ordinary lives, and Arthur lingers on battlements and in windows to see them and let himself be seen in turn. 

One day, when they're alone together after a council meeting, Bill finally asks, "What do you want from them?"

He expects a flippant answer, but Arthur says, "Love."

Bill looks up from his papers. People surprise him so rarely, it's galling that Arthur manages it with such regularity. He leans a hip against the table and gives this declaration every appearance of incredulity. 

"Really?"

Arthur nods. He looks like nothing so much as a big, earnest schoolboy, perched on the broad sill with his feet bumping carelessly against the wall, a half-eaten apple in his hand, the hand resting on his thigh. 

"People have had fear a long time in this land. Fear's corrosive. You can't build on it, you can only survive it. Look at Vortigern - he wanted their fear and he got it, but frightened people always have one eye on the door, looking for the next thing."

"The Born King?"

Arthur shrugs. "Or whatever else they could get. Look, it didn't have to be me, I'm an arsehole and we both know it. But the way I see it, they deserve someone they don't have to fear, and love's something you can build on. So if I could have something from them, I'd have their love."

"And how do you plan to get it from them?"

"By deserving it," Arthur says, through a mouthful of his apple - yes, there's that brothel upbringing. He chomps, and chews, and swallows, and then grins big and sly. "How'm I doing?"

Bill looks at his wholly unexpected king, limned in afternoon gold.

"Come away from the window," he says.

"Why?" Arthur says, through another mouthful of apple.

"Because I'm going to fuck you, and I don't think it will advance your project if I do it in view of all England."

Arthur huffs a laugh, and then with a clean flick of the wrist he sends the apple core sailing over Bill's right shoulder uncomfortably close to his ear, though Bill knows better than to flinch. It clatters into a scuttle somewhere unseen, perhaps a kind of rebuke for such forwardness, though Arthur still hops down from his perch and moves towards him. He moves slowly, all heavy leonine prowl, intent in the set of his shoulders and wickedness in the set of his mouth. Bill thinks ruefully that he does look like someone you could - if indeed you were to take such extreme leave of your senses - come to love.


End file.
